


the road to recovery is paved in bouncy balls and ceiling tiles

by Senatsu



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Season 7 Spoilers, goodnight nitghtvale goodnight, i made it myself, it's almost 5 in the AM, not shipfic, since I knew VLD would never give me the scene I needed, with Shiro mentoring Lance on self-discovery and relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-08-13
Packaged: 2019-06-26 19:38:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15669930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Senatsu/pseuds/Senatsu
Summary: Lance is just a bit on the antsy side, recovering in his hospital room post-battle-and-epic-war-and-whatever.Shiro drops in for a visitThe two of them have... more of a heart-to-heart than usual.





	the road to recovery is paved in bouncy balls and ceiling tiles

Lance should maybe probably almost definitely not be bouncing a ball off the wall of the hospital room. There are like, fifty-three different things in here minimum that would probably do the opposite of benefitting from getting hit by a ricocheting rubber ball coming straight at them.

It’s just, even as glued-to-his-side-until-the-end-of-time-and-maybe-after his family has been (it’s only been, god, _four years_ since he disappeared off the face of the earth and they thought he might be dead, of course they’re a little attached, and he even moreso than any of them!), they still can’t stay in his hospital room all the time. (They would know. They’ve tried. The hospital staff won’t hear of it.)

And as happy as he is to get to rest, _finally_ , after like a hundred million days of being busy from the time his alarm topples him out of his space bed til the moment he faceplants in the pillow again every single approximation of a day that he was gone, being that busy constantly only to suddenly have… almost nothing… and be stuck in a hospital bed instead of a quick-acting Altean healing pod, is a little disconcerting.

And frustrating.

Definitely frustrating.

So he’s maybe a liiiittle more willing than he should be to take risks with the dang bouncy ball in his hospital room.

What he doesn’t expect it to suddenly hit is a half-disembodied floating white-metaled prosthetic arm out of hecking nowhere.

“And I thought Keith was the stir-crazy one,” comes a dry but fond voice, tossing the ball up and down in that hand. “But at least he was using one of those old paddle-string-ball toys instead. Antsy, Sharpshooter?”

Lance rubs the back of his neck sheepishly, ducking his gaze a little, though his own voice is chipper, at least for a moment. “Hey, Cap! Fancy meetin’ you here! I uh. ...yeah.” He groans and flomps back against his stack of pillows, staring up at the ceiling, mournful. “I wanna be out running laps around my niece and nephew, or pickin’ on Mama’s food while she’s cooking and trying not to get caught so she smacks my hands away! Not stuck here! This stinks.” He sighs dramatically. “I know it could be like a thousand times worse or whatever, and I’m totally grateful! I just. Rrrrrgh.”

Shiro laughs as he perches himself sideways on one side of Lance’s hospital bed, resting his flesh hand on his thigh and offering Lance his ball back with the other. “I know, Lance. Believe me, I know.”

Lance looks up at him, then, sitting back up properly. “...yeah, I guess you would, huh. So what did you like… do? Times like this, I mean. How did you. Make it work?”

Shiro lets out a puff of air that ruffles his signature little hair tuft. “Lots of things, I suppose. Equations. Flight manual routines. Counting ceiling tiles.”

“Forty-eight,” mumbles Lance.

“Mm?”

Lance gestures at the ceiling in the room. “Forty-eight ceiling tiles.”

Shiro starts laughing again, and Lance can’t help but smile. It’s not something his Fearless Leader used to have an easy time doing, not when they first rescued him from his crash to earth and Garrison quarantine. Understandably, considering he’d been through hell and then some the entire year he was gone (Lance tries not to think about it even now). He’s glad that despite the continued strife and heartache the universe has continued to throw at them all, especially Takashi Shirogane, the man finally seems to be healing in whatever small ways he can.

It’s good to hear him laugh.

“I guess some things are just universal, huh,” Shiro says, looking up at the ceiling himself.

They’re both quiet, then, for who knows how long; Lance doesn’t mind, though. In Shiro’s case, he never has.

“...hey, Shiro?”

“Yeah, Lance?”

“Actually, there’s. There’s somethin I’ve been wanting to ask you, kinda.” There’s a nervous element to his voice, now, a little extra squeak that seems to always sneak in like Lance is going through Puberty: Take 2 when he’s anxious over something. “I mean, ever since you like. Told us about, you know. AboutAdam.” He hates bringing it up, because he knows, god he knows what a sore subject that’s gotta be, but it’s relevant and he doesn’t know how else to even do it. “I just, I mean, like, okay, how did you. When you were younger, and stupider, and confused… er… how’d you figure out you were like _actually_ into dudes?”

Shiro blinks at Lance a few times, as thrown for a loop as he usually is when Lance starts babbling, and then all the moreso at the abrupt switch in subject matter - but then he smiles, and chuckles. “An interesting choice of phrasing…”

Lance reddens and picks at the seam of the sheet resting over his lap. “Well! Well. I just kinda figured, lotsa people are, you know, _curious_ , but that doesn’t mean _everyone_ is gay. I think.”

Shiro makes a soft _“aahh”_ of understanding then, and hums, seeming to lose himself in his thoughts - dust-covered old memories of a time when he was Lance’s age, and even younger, lost in a sea of hormones and pretty people and an even worse ability to start conversations then than he has now.

“I tried it, I guess,” he muses at long last. “When I found someone I wanted to try with, who was just as interested as I was. And even though it didn’t last, I just… knew it was right for me. Knew it felt different than how I’d ever felt around the girls whose company I enjoyed.” Then he turns his soft grey eyes on Lance, inquisitive. “Something got you thinking about it?”

Lance starts fidgeting even harder, crumpling up the bedsheet into little pleated folds, smoothing it out, folding it up all over again. “It’s just, Allura, you know? And she - I - I think I really, _really_ like her. Like, _like_ -like her. More than anyone I’ve ever met! It’s… it feels different. It feels good. But I think a lot about. I donno. I sometimes think that maybe I feel the same way about guys that I feel about girls. Some of the aliens we met, some of the kids from school, I donno, just - what if. What if I only like her cause I think that’s what I’m supposed to want? And I hurt her cause I don’t even know myself enough to know whether what I thought I wanted _is_ what I want. I-I mean!” He starts waving his hands frantically. “Not that, anything is, even gonna happen, i-it’s not like I know what Allura wants either and she’s never said anything and she’s super nice to everyone so I don’t wanna assume that she’d even - I just, I mean, just in case! ...just in case, it ever. Maybe. Had a chance.” He bites his lip, picking at the dead skin on the surface with his teeth.

There’s another long pause, as Shiro takes all this in, quietly absorbing the details, fitting it into what he’s seen about Lance, what he knows of him, what he’s experienced in his own life, both directly and indirectly. And then, at last, “You know it’s okay to feel the same way about _both_ , right? Or all, if that’s how you feel. Everything from one end of the scale to the other.”

Lance lifts his eyes, then, and it’s clear that no, no he very much does not know that. “R… really?” He looks off to the side, at one of the many vitals displays in the room, letting out a shaky breath. “Lots of people I knew said that kinda thing was… just a phase. That like, it was just - just a step in bein gay. Or whatever. Like, you didn’t _really_ like guys AND girls and stuff, just. You hadn’t gotten all the way to one yet. So I thought. Maybe I’m that way too. Maybe I don’t actually like girls, I’m just. A work in progress.”

Shiro gives him a rueful, empathetic smile, shifting so he faces Lance a bit more, his voice soft. “It can be just a step, yes, for people struggling to work things out, and just like you, thinking they should be or… should like one specific thing or another until they realize they don’t. But it doesn’t have to be, Lance. I’ve known and met plenty of wonderful people who were attracted to anyone and everyone, regardless of how far along in life they were. It’s very real. And it is completely okay to be like that.”

Even though he thinks he’s still got a lotta confusion left ahead of him, it does actually feel very much like a heckton of weight has lifted right off Lance’s shoulders and away into the clouds like a paladin with a jetpack. He’s like undyingly grateful he finally worked up the courage to ask. Takashi Shirogane, here to save Lance’s whole entire butt, again!

“Sssooo…”

“Mmhm?”

“It’s totally valid to think that Nyma _and_ Rolo were kinda really hot?”

And Shiro facefaults, and g r o a n s, and reaches out to ruffle Lance’s short hair into messy, static-y little tufts - to much protest - and pushes his head down. “Yeah, yeah, it’s completely valid, and I woulda kicked your blue-armored butt no matter which of them you let sweet-talk you into going off on a date so they could steal your Lion.”

Lance is laughing, though, pushing Shiro’s hand away and smoothing his sweet ‘do back into its usual place. “Okay, _Grandpa_!”

Shiro splutters. “Lance McClain, just because Altean magic turned my hair white does NOT mean--”

Even more laughter spills out of Lance. “I’m just kidding! You can _totally_ make that hair work, Boss! The next time we need a fundraiser, we’ll have a photoshoot starring you, Voltron’s star Silver Fox Man, it’ll be a hit!”

This is, quite possibly even _worse_ than the grandpa joke, and Shiro very quickly steals one of Lance’s pillows so that he can pretend to suffocate him with it.

Change is constant, change is all around, so many things change every day -

\- and then again, perhaps comfortingly, some things never do.

**Author's Note:**

> like many, I desperately hoped that the art from ages ago of the characters holding signs together meant that Shiro would get to be like, a cool mentor for Lance on this type of journey. 
> 
> seeing as VLD writing and direction staff literally trashed their LGBT rep beyond belief, despite there being one season left I'm gonna go with "no." (and I say this as someone who still is excited about Lance gettin' with Allura like seems to be the setup in-universe. BISEXUAL PEOPLE ARE STILL BISEXUAL EVEN WITHIN STRAIGHT RELATIONSHIPS THANKS!) 
> 
> so here I am, back from the dead, it's been eighty-four years, I wrote this, there's no strong start beginning or especially finish but this is what I had motivation for so this is what you get, I'm so sorry, I just live here, I'm dead inside,


End file.
